Mitsui Fudosan and Takenaka Corporation are planning to build a 17-story wood-frame office tower in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district. With a proposed height of 70 meters, this would be the tallest wooden building in Japan.
The wood is coming from a sustainable forest owned by Mitsui. The building will use about 20% less carbon than a steel framed building would have.
He makes readers feel in on the savage joke that is late capitalism
Like most newsletters, I read Money Stuff sporadically. Unlike most newsletters, I always learn something and laugh along the way. Levine is an incredibly humane writer about a topic that rarely is.
Radiative cooling is a phenomenon that allows people to make ice in the dessert on a clear night, but practical uses in our modern world have been limited — primarily because it’s most useful at night. Aaswath Raman and his team of researchers are using nanotechnology to create a material that reflects solar radiation and disrupts thermal heat enough to make radiative cooling possible during the day. It’s an incredibly elegant solution to how to keep materials cool without using mechanics or electricity. They’ve commercialized the tech into a way to make air conditioners more efficient.
I genuinely love solutions like this to the biggest problem we face as a planet. It’s innovative, cheap, works with existing systems, and doesn’t require some massive sacrifice. When I see how these small changes can add up, it give me hope, as well as infuriates me that we waste so much time arguing over whether climate change is even a problem worth addressing instead of getting to the urgent work of making the world a better place.
One of Facebook’s more salient and successful qualities is the ability to see where things are headed in a big picture sense — perhaps that’s generous, or perhaps it’s what you’d expect from the most pervasive panopticon ever created. They realized early on normal people don’t care about things like privacy online and exploited that to their maximum advantage, for example. It made them wildly successful and largely unassailable.
They’ve finally looked into the fetid swamp of QAnon and decided that being a vector for this insane malignancy of a truly mad age is not a great look. Only three years too late and after this dark conspiracy has become an untamable Lovecraftian horror. But they see there’s a political, if not necessarily cultural, shift and playing along with Trumpism no longer seems like a winning game. Their cowardice and irresponsiblity will haunt us for a long long time.
Reagan Ray isolated the lettering from dozens of iconic jazz artists. These are glorious.
I’m not much of a podcast listener these days but I’m excited to hear these two gents wax philosophically about Instagram bullshit. And because Noah and Adam are smart and thoughtful and hilarious, we’ll actually get something out of it beyond “can you believe all this bullshit!”
As someone who often gets caught up in the old ads when I’m reading a scanned story from a magazine archive, I thought this bit from Adam was really smart:
I’m also someone who believes that history is written in the edges, and advertising is in the edges. It’s not the body of the content of culture itself, but it’s in the edges, in the detritus of culture, and there’s more value in the details and nuances of that garbage that we call marketing than most people give credit to. A core practice of mine is to search for the deeper meaning in marketing. If marketing is mapped throughout time, then I believe we have a map of meaning throughout recorded history. So there’s a deeper basis for what you and I get to talk about in these shows when we’re eating oatmeal together or wiping our asses.
And that design by Claude Zeins, aping every subway ad I’ve seen the past two years, is perfect
I showed this to someone and they said, “So.. you built a button that you press that will press a button? Why not just press the button?” which was a bit infuriating because they clearly missed the whole point. “Don’t you get it? This button BAD, but this button GOOD. Me want to press GOOD button.”
Work on the things that matter to you.
The wonderful Zeynep Tufekci1 continues to sharpen our understanding about what’s actually happening with the virus, this time with a very clear and lucid piece about why all distribution is not equal. It’s looking like COVID-19 spreads non-uniformly via “overdispersion”:
There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.
The entire piece is worth pouring another cup of tea to dig into. The analogy of Jeff Bezos walking into a bar and suddenly the average net worth of the bar is over a billion dollars is stark, as is the comparison to deterministic infections like influenza. Our global response systems aren’t prepared to fight “stochastic disease patterns” that behave seemingly at random rather than in linear and predictable patterns.
Or “the mean is not the message”.
Tufekci — a brilliant and accomplished writer, speaker, and presenter — has been one of the leading voices of sanity from the beginning of the pandemic, including first raising the alarm about the need to wear masks. She is also a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina — GO HEELS. ↩︎
We just got our ballots and Biden/Harris is listed twice, in the Democratic column and the Working Families Party column — selecting either counts in the final tally. If you live in New York, please consider supporting the Working Families Party to help support a progressive choice.
This year, thanks to needless new rules supported by Governor Cuomo, the WFP needs 2% of the total vote in order to maintain its automatic ballot line in future elections. Support progressive politics in New York, vote for Biden/Harris, and tell Cuomo to go to hell by filling in a single bubble.
With Adobe finally killing Flash at the end of this year, Jonas Richner catalogs not just the time wasters of the early aughts web but the impact they had on casual mobile games today. I spent a small part of my early career building all kinds of Flash things (no games, mostly newsy interactive storytelling stuff) and this was definitely a trip to relive. I’m not exactly nostalgic for Flash, or even the pre-social web that led to where we are today, but I have to admit there was a kind of Precambrian quality to the sheer amount of creativity happening at the time. Most of that has been captured and commodified by a few giant tech platforms, with plenty of upside for the creators who have actual careers building goofy web stuff, of course. Evolution and progress are not necessarily the same path.